Create a signed app with Cordova (Shallow Thoughts)

Create a signed app with Cordova

I wrote last week about developing apps with PhoneGap/Cordova. But one thing I didn't cover. When you type cordova build, you're building only a debug version of your app. If you want to release it, you have to sign it. Figuring out how turned out to be a little tricky.

Most pages on the web say you can sign your apps by creating platforms/android/ant.properties with the same keystore information in it that you'd put in an ant build, then running cordova build android --release

But Cordova completely ignored my ant.properties file and went on creating a debug .apk file and no signed one.

I found various other purported solutions on the web, like creating a build.json file in the app's top-level directory ... but that just made Cordova die with a syntax error inside one of its own files). This is the only method that worked for me:

Create a file called platforms/android/release-signing.properties, and put this in it:

storeFile=/path/to/your-keystore.keystore
storeType=jks
keyAlias=some-key
// if you don't want to enter the password at every build, use this:
keyPassword=your-key-password
storePassword=your-store-password

Then cordova build android --release finally works, and creates a file called platforms/android/build/outputs/apk/android-release.apk